Bonaventura Badoardo de Peraga

Bonaventura Badoer da Peraga, also recorded as Bonaventura Badoardo de Peraga and sometimes called Bonaventure of Padua, was born in 1332 at Peraga, a locality in the territory of Padua in the Veneto of northern Italy. He belonged to the Badoer, a family of Venetian nobility. In the fourteenth century Padua was an important communal and signorial centre under the Carrara lords, with a university that drew scholars from across Italy. He entered the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine, the mendicant order that combined eremitical origins with preaching and university study. As an Augustinian he took the vows of the order and was directed toward theology and pastoral work, in keeping with the constitutions and the studia of the Hermits in that century.

He became a doctor and professor of theology and acquired a reputation as a preacher and teacher. Fourteenth-century Augustinians were active at the University of Paris and in the Italian houses of study; Bonaventura is associated with that scholarly world, including Padua. Precise lists of every chair he held are not fully preserved, but he belonged to the generation of mendicant masters who moved between convents and universities. His middle years fell in the last phase of the Avignon Papacy and the return of the curia to Rome under Gregory XI. When Gregory XI died in 1378, the election of the Italian Urban VI was followed almost at once by the withdrawal of a majority of the cardinals and the election of Robert of Geneva as Clement VII, opening the Western Schism that divided Latin Christendom until 1417.

Urban VI, needing a college of cardinals loyal to the Roman obedience, held a consistory on 18 September 1378 and created several new cardinals. Among them was Bonaventura, who received the title of Cardinal-Priest of Santa Cecilia. He thus became one of the early Augustinian cardinals of that period and remained with Urban VI. The pontificate was extremely troubled. Urban’s harsh temperament, his conflicts with members of the Sacred College, and the military and political struggles of the schism made Rome and the Papal States dangerous. Later historical notices report that Bonaventura met a violent death in 1389, by poison or assassination, a fate consistent with the factional violence around Urban VI’s court. The year of death is given as 1389; the day traditionally linked to his memory is 10 July.

After his death he was honoured in the Augustinian Order as Blessed Bonaventure of Padua, with a commemoration on 10 July in Augustinian calendars. He was never Bishop of Rome and never held the office of patriarch of an Eastern see. As a professed religious he lived under a vow of celibacy; he is not recorded as having married or as having children. Specific patronages of places, professions, or causes are not well documented in standard sources, and the exact place of his burial in Rome is not established with certainty here. His life shows how a mendicant theologian from the Veneto could rise to the cardinalate at a moment of deep division in the Latin Church, and how the politics of the schism could bring such a career to a sudden end.